Peter Kay Family History

Peter John Kay was born on July 2nd, 1973 to Michael John and Margaret Deirdre Kay in Farnworth near Bolton in Lancashire.  His mother was Irish Catholic and Peter was brought up in her faith.  Peter grew up in a terraced house in Bolton with his parents, grandparents and younger sister Julie.

By his mid-teens he was working in a variety of odd jobs around the town before taking an HND (Higher National Diploma) in media performance at Salford University.

Afterwards he began working part-time as a stand-up comedian.  His first success was in the competition The North West Comedian of the Year.  However, he continued to work as an usher at his local cinema in Bolton.

It was not until the cinema closed and he entered and won Channel 4’s So You Think You’re Funny? contest in 1997 that he seriously considered a career in comedy.

Standup Comic.  The breakthrough came in 2001 when Phoenix Knights aired on Channel 4.  This sitcom, which played for two series, revolved around a fictional working men’s club in Bolton.  Peter, who also co-wrote the series, played its cost-cutting wheelchair owner.  The show became a huge cult hit.

Fast forward ten years and his UK tour of 2010-11 broke the Guinness world record for the biggest-selling stand-up tour ever, selling more than 1.2 million tickets.  In 2015 his TV sitcom Peter Kay’s Car Share was aired and proved hugely popular.  After a break of twelve years Peter returned to stand-up touring in 2022.

Peter’s chubby persona and mundane yet humorous take on everyday life has endeared himself to British audiences.

But he has not chased fame.  He has been a private person, particularly about his family life, and would sometimes disappear for a long stretch of time – often, it would appear, to Ireland (either to his mother’s hometown or to his place in Tipperary).

Peter and His Nan

Peter’s Nan Edie was the longest-lasting of his family.  She was sixty-eight when her husband died in 1990; seventy-seven when her son died in 1999; and ninety-five when Peter said in his 2017 show that, yes, she is still here (she died a year later).

She lived in a separate flat in her later years.  Peter would visit her there.  One time he took her to McDonalds.  This was not an establishment she frequented.  Peter showed her the menu and asked her what she would like.  She said “two free whiffies.”  Peter, perplexed, looked at where she was pointing and saw “free wi-fi.”

Yes, she would mangle words.  She wondered if “Face Tube” was how you talked to your friends online.  She called an iPod a “thod” and tried to insert it into an old cassette player. And she believed that Blu-ray was a man who did “pornography at the back of a Nissan Sunny.”  She wasn’t very suited to the modern era.

His Nan featured in many of his monologues.  A figure of fun perhaps.  But a figure of affection too.

Bolton Heritage

Bolton, Peter Kay’s hometown, was a Lancashire mill-town and today is proud of its industrial heritage.

Local inventors Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton were the pioneers of cotton spinning machines and Bolton emerged as a cotton boomtown in the 19th century.  The industry expansion was assisted by the availability of coal as fuel at a number of mines in the area.  And canal and railway links were developed.

Peter’s namesake James Kay, born in Turton near Bolton, developed a successful wet spinning process for flax in 1825.  This helped to industrialize linen spinning.  After he died in 1857, his descendants held Turton Tower and were local squires.

By the 1920’s the cotton industry had fallen into decline and there is little left of it today.  However, despite the mill closures, employment in Bolton continued to rely on large-scale manufacture until well into the late 20th century.

Peter’s Working Class Roots

Peter Kay has working class roots in Bolton, with coal-mining initially very much to the fore.

Early Kays.  Peter’s ancestry has been traced back to his two times great grandfather William Kay born in the early 1860’s, a coal miner in late Victorian times:

• William’s son John, who lost his first wife Lydia in 1918 at a young age, was also a collier.  He worked at the east of Ellesmere mine at Farnworth.
• while two of John’s sons went down the mine as well.  His daughter Florence was sweeping factory floors in 1920 at the age of twelve.

John had married again in 1919 and their son Stanley was born in Farnworth in 1923.  Sadly his second wife Margaret also died young, in this case around 1926 after the birth of their third child Billy.

Later Kays.  Stanley, Peter’s grandfather, started out as a haulage hand in a coal mine.  He would later work as a stoker on steam trains and down coal mines.  However, he developed lung disease that forced him to take early retirement.  He died in 1990 at the age of sixty-seven, much missed by the young Peter.

His wife Edith was a turner in a local brass factory when they married in 1946.   She would outlive her husband by twenty-eight years, dying in 2018.

Their son Michael, Peter’s father, was born in 1948. He married Deirdre, a lass from Northern Ireland, in Bolton in 1968.  At that time he was working as a maintenance fitter at a local cotton mill.  Later he was employed as a semi-skilled machinist and engineer before his early death from alcoholism in 1999 at the age of fifty-one.  Thus he never lived to see his son’s comic career take off.

Reader Feedback: My father William John Clugston was Michael Kay’s cousin.  So it was nice to read about the father John Kay of my grandmother Florence Clugston nee Kay being a collier. I’d never known that about him. Very interesting as my grandfather and three of his sons also went down the mine.  Kathryn Williamson.

Reader Feedback: I am the wife of Peter Clugston the youngest and only surviving son of Florence Clugston.  I note there are some discrepancies in the family tree.  We are not aware of Henry.  The youngest daughter of Lydia is not mentioned.  She was Lena Kay.   It also fails to mention Billy Kay, the youngest son of Margaret.  We were told that she died giving birth to him and Florence had to give up her job to look after him.  Catherine Clugston.

Reader Feedback: I am related to Peter Kay purely by his marriage to my great aunt’s cousin.  Corey.

Peter Kay’s Family Tree